Superbugs: Where Are the Wonder Drugs?

The latest threat to America's health is a drug-resistant strain of bacteria, Streptococcus pneumoniae, that causes ear infections in children as well as pneumonia and meningitis in adults. It was first spotted in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago and wended its way across Europe, growing steadily resistant to more and more antibiotics. The latest and scariest sighting: Nine children in Rochester, N.Y., came down with a strain that shrugs off all 18 antibiotics approved for kids. The Rochester doctors who found the bug beat it into submission with Johnson & Johnson's (JNJ ) Levaquin, a drug for adults, but only after it left one child with permanent hearing loss.